I've been thinking about picking up an SSD but I know for sure that I'm way too lazy too move things around and manage dealing with a smaller amount of space. Or even making a boot drive and then putting everything else on another hdd. I've been looking at the reviews for intel SRT and it seems to be pretty good certainly for my usage habits. What I haven't been able to find are any reviews of it for the new generation of Ivy Bridge boards. Does anyone here have much experience with it? Did they do any work on improving it between sandy and ivy? It hasn't seemed to of gotten much attention recently although it was mentioned in the recent TR build guide. Considering my current setup I would need to upgrade my cpu and mb but I could always use an excuse to upgrade my aging core 2 E6420. Is there any benefit to using a higher capacity SSD with SRT? Most of the examples talk about using a small drive which is sort of the point but I could probably swing a 120 gb or so drive.

But anyways your conroe 2.13ghz 775 chip does overclock to 3ghz+ in most cases but it definitely getting long in the tooth. But would make a great HTPC cpu with a 7750 or so dedicated low power graphics card that just so happens to have enough power to game at 1080p with some settings turned down. Plus you can find them in low profile size and they do not need a pci-E power connector. They pull all there voltage from the pci bus.

You would notice a huge bump in performance upgrading to sandy bridge and or ivy bridge. Even a i3 2120 65watt dual core with HT is very very snappy. But if you have the money i rec a i5 dedicated quad core if you do much video encoding and highly threaded applications. As for Smart Response tech, It can cut your load times almost in half with the z67 and newer chipsets like z77, z75.Here is a link from may of last year with a small 20 gb cache drive. http://www.anandtech.com/show/4329/inte ... g-review/4 But i feel you are beter off getting a 128gb SSD and load you OS and whatever stuff you use all the time and get a large slave HDD say a 1-2TB caviar green or the new reasonably priced but better performing "NEW" caviar RED drives. I am running a old 1st gen corsair force 60gb SSD drive with 3 2tb caviar green storage drives on my gaming rig. The 2 TB green drives perform good enough to run games from also. Since i grabbed my SSD back when they cost twice as much as today 60gb is too small and SRT was not available on my Gigabyte p67-ud4-b3 WITH A 2600K. My 60gb drive quickly was overfull and i run almost all large games off of my green HDD's. Wish i did have SRT but i built my rig over a year and half ago and not one problem so i cannot complain. Plus how many computers over a year and a half old are still in the top 5% when it comes to performance. I am very happy with my purchase and its the only computer i have built that was not outclassed in 6 months like back in 2004 or 2005 when i built my watercooled 4800x2 with dual x1800xt's in crossfire. Heck a month after i built it the dang 1900xts came out i was very disappointed

I am sure The desk top Sandy/Ivy Bridge cpus will serve everyone who has one for many years to come without the need for upgrading. But on the laptop front i think Intels Haswell cpus with the supposed 3x graphics improvement over the ivy bridge IGP will be very popular for a bit of gaming on the cheap with long battery life.

Given TR's enthusiast orientation, the majority of SSD users around here are probably using SSDs as OS drives (myself included -- Intel 320 80GB in my dekstop with two 1GB Spinpoint F3s for data, and Samsung 830 256GB in my notebook).

So, considering that:

1) You DON'T want to transfer your OS to the SSD2) Intel SRT supports a maximum of 64GB3) You can currently pick up a 30-40GB drive for around $50

...why not just give it a try, and then let us know how it performs for you?

Are there any benefits to using SRT versus Readyboost on a fast USB3 stick?

The fastest USB3 sticks don't have much better performance than a mechanical hdd. Plus, from my knowledge of Readyboost, that tech is meant to provide additional "virtual RAM" to a computer that doesn't have enough. As far as I'm aware, it has recieved little attention because it was an epic fail. It's cheaper and more effective to just do a RAM upgrade.

Back to the OP topic. SRT is certainly an option if you're feeling lazy. Do be aware that it's an "adaptive" boost though. Things won't be cached until you've done that same operation more than once. Even then, the cache can only hold so much, once it's full, it dumps old cache data to make room for new. It's definetly a step up from hdd only, but its never quite the same as an SSD which makes everything fast the first time. You should read these few pages on SSD caching to familiarize yourself. SSD caching was really designed to be used back when SSDs were much more expensive than they are today. (like $2+/GB compared to almost $0.50/GB on some SSDs now)

You can get a 120GB Vertex 3 for $75. I've found mine to be more than sufficient for storing my OS, programs, and all games (still have 45GB free actually). You can easily redirect your "My Documents" (etc.) shortcuts to point to your mechanical hdd as well. If I go to the start menu => my pictures for example, I'm on my mechanical hdd. It's really seamless once you get it set up. I don't even notice that I have two hard drives. Heck, if you go that route you don't even have to completely rebuild your current computer. Not sure what the downside is.

Are there any benefits to using SRT versus Readyboost on a fast USB3 stick?

The fastest USB3 sticks don't have much better performance than a mechanical hdd. Plus, from my knowledge of Readyboost, that tech is meant to provide additional "virtual RAM" to a computer that doesn't have enough. As far as I'm aware, it has recieved little attention because it was an epic fail. It's cheaper and more effective to just do a RAM upgrade.

ReadyBoost is a read-only disk cache. It is not "virtual RAM". The latter myth was propogated due to people recommending ReadyBoost for Vista systems that were running the bare minimum of RAM (512MB). In that situation the system is under memory pressures and so unused data is frequently paged to disk in an effort to leave RAM open for the current data sets. The ReadyBoost disk cache is able to back the contents of the pagefile. The disk itself has to do the write (ReadyBoost is not a write cache), but the subsequent reads to the pagefile to retrieve data can be pulled from the ReadyBoost cache instead. This gives reads an SSD like feel, which helps the responsivenes of the underlying disk thrashing occuring due to lack of RAM.

ReadyBoost can work in a system with more RAM available, but the impact is muted due to caching technology like SuperFetch. If your workload is made up of many small files that undergo frequent access then ReadyBoost might help. The rapidly falling prices of SSD, the super low prices of RAM, and the fact ReadyBoost is a read-only cache, are the items that relegate the tech to an idea with good intentions. Unfortunately the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

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